Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham Talk “Pretty/Dirty”

On the fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum, just outside the Marilyn Minter retrospective, there’s a notice printed in bold letters on the glass doors. “This exhibition contains sexually explicit content and may not be suitable for all audiences, including minors. Viewer discretion is advised.”

The directive sets the tone for the next few rooms in which Minter’s searingly provocative pieces are displayed. “Pretty/Dirty,” her first museum retrospective, arrived here in the fall and will, the museum announces today, remain until May 7, having traveled first from Houston to Denver and Orange County, California. It spans her 40-plus-year oeuvre, beginning with a series of rarely seen photographs that a 19-year-old Minter took of her mother. “I feel like this is the kernel, or the core, of Marilyn’s work,” Laurie Simmons said on Saturday, standing in front of the images. Simmons and her husband, Carroll Dunham, were holding a talk at the institution, walking museumgoers through the exhibition, and offering anecdotes and commentary on their longtime friend’s work.

“These were shot when Marilyn was very young,” Simmons continued, motioning to a black-and-white photograph of Minter’s mother splayed across a mattress, curlers in her hair and a cigarette dripping out of her mouth. “Her mother was a drug addict, an alcoholic, meant to be very beautiful and very glamorous. But she was very narcissistic, very conscious of her own beauty and maintaining the image of herself in the height of her addiction. I think those are concepts that Marilyn ends up talking about in her work: beauty, the facade of beauty, the dark side of beauty, and she’s not afraid to approach it from the place of fashion or commercial art. And those subjects were taboo for artists to think about, especially [in] fashion.”

The exhibition explores Minter’s fascination with the commodification of the female form, and sexual empowerment is a connective thread throughout. “Marilyn identifies herself as a ‘pro-sex feminist.’ There was a divide in feminism between those who were against pornography and those who were for pornography. And Marilyn got a lot of blowback from feminists who were not pro-sex and it was very upsetting to her at the time. She often says she was kicked out of the art world,” Simmons said, referring to a period in the early ’90s when much of the female art world rejected Minter’s work for its incorporation of pornography. “And I always told her, there’s no ‘out’ in the art world. There’s no door you can be shown out. But then I stopped saying that to her, because that’s how she felt. She felt she was ostracized.”

Minter’s embrace of the more commercial aspects of fashion was felt to be similarly against the grain. “Marilyn is really very fearless,” Simmons said, motioning to an extremely close-up enamel-on-metal painting of a model’s face—showcasing errant eyebrow hairs, a smattering of freckles, and a ripe pimple—called Blue Poles, which hung on the other side of the gallery. “When Marilyn started to make these paintings, I was really blown way, because they veered so dangerously close to ads or editorials in fashion magazines. She has a real lack of fear of the word fashion, which was for a long time a dirty word in our world, because beauty and fashion were deemed equally trivial, which is not the way it is. We’ve always known the fashion world borrows a little from artists, but at this point, we now know there’s a borrowing from the fashion world as well.”

At the moment, though, Minter’s focus is mostly on activism. “I’ve been friends with Marilyn for 30 or 35 years and right now, and this is the time,” said Simmons, who, like Minter, is an ardent supporter of Planned Parenthood and Halt Action Group. “On the last stop of your retrospective, you can give yourself time to do something else. Marilyn likes to say for now that’s all she’s going to do, to focus on her activism. But as an artist, she’ll never stop.”